Basilone received a Medal of Honor for bravery on Guadalcanal in 1942, was brought home to help sell war bonds and grace the cover of Life magazine. Then he asked to return to combat. At Iwo Jima, in February 1945, he single-handedly took out an enemy bunker before being killed by an artillery shell. He was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross and the Purple Heart.

Seven years ago, Basilone was one of four Marines featured on U.S. postage stamps. A current crop of admirers has created their own monument to him — a Facebook page.

The Wasp

The slopes of Fort Rosecrans are dotted with memorials honoring soldiers of the Mexican-American War, the Mormon Battalion, Taffy 3 and the sailors who died in 1905 when the Bennington exploded in San Diego Bay. Even in this crowd, the Wasp is easy to find. Its monument sits at the foot of a hill, below the cemetery’s office.

Berry visits several times a year. He reads the plaque, which lists everyone who died while sailing on this carrier, from its 1940 voyages across the North Atlantic to its 1942 demise in the South Pacific. Two names always give him pause: Ezell Douberley and Eddie Wicker.

“I talk to all my friends,” he said. “It means a whole lot.”

This one-sided conversation will end some day, but a new discussion has begun. At this year’s reunion of the USS Wasp CV-7 Stingers Club, friends and family outnumbered Wasp survivors by five-to-one. Typical of the younger members is Matt Heffernan, a grandson of a Wasp sailor who died in 1946.

Heffernan, 43, never met his grandfather and knew nothing about the Wasp until a few years ago, when he found the carrier mentioned on the Internet.

“I found this group,” the Denver resident said. “Now I’ve got a whole bunch of grandfathers.”

And they have a leader. Although he was born more than a quarter century after the carrier sank, Heffernan was recently elected the USS Wasp CV-7 Stingers Club’s president.

U-T San Diego librarian Merrie Monteagudo helped research this article.